The Art of Friction: Henry James's Evasion of the Pictorial

Abstract

Few readers are more wedded to the analogy between word and picture than the critics of Henry James, who find in the world of visual art an assortment of metaphors with which to account for, among other things, idiosyncrasies of style, innovations in narrative technique, and principles of composition. 1 Though such characterizations are frequently qualified by an acknowledgement of the incommensurability of visual and linguistic mediums, the analogy has always seemed too settled a thing to gainsay. This manner of reading James, though admittedly hard to resist, has always struck me as a too convenient way of coming to grips with one of literature's most notoriously intractable narrative styles. It allays, I think, a persistent anxiety on the part of readers toward all there is in James (and there is plenty) that is elaborately, aggressively discursive and abstract; it is a defense against the perceptual distress, so to speak, that comes of the mind's eye having no object to fix upon, no place of repose. What William James observed of philosophy's failure to grasp the elusive, "transitive parts" of thought itself—"So inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to other purposes" (243, 246)—might well be said of the attempts to get at James through a rhetoric of the pictorial. In our habitual recurrence to such a mode of reading, we would do well to recall (somewhat ironically given his philosophical affinity for the vague) the frustrated William comically grasping at a way to characterize Henry's "method of narration by interminable elaboration of suggestive reference (I don't know what to call it, but you know what I mean)" (Skrupskelis and Berkeley 463).